by Ruby Namdar
15
Ann Lee arrived at seven forty-five, just as the cocktail reception was about to end, wearing a short black dress and glitzy black high heels that Andrew had never seen before. On the whole, there was something about her that he didn’t recognize, something disturbingly different that enveloped her like a dark halo. She didn’t apologize for being late or offer an explanation. Nor did she owe him any, of course. “Get a load of that!” she said, pointing with her chin to the white bird’s neck draped over the main table. “Is it at least dead?” She kissed Andrew lightly on the cheek. “Be a darling and bring me some champagne, will you?” Since when did she talk in that la-di-da way? He couldn’t help feeling she was getting back at him for something. What did she have to be angry about? But there was no point in playing the innocent. He knew very well what it was. Champagne for her and another whiskey for himself, a double this time. It was going to be a long, hard night.
“I do believe it’s my old friend Andrew!” The loud, familiar voice booming behind him made him turn around quickly. Standing there was Bernie Bernstein, president of the university, tall and elegant as always, his arms spread theatrically as if about to clasp Andrew to his bosom. “Andrew P. Cohen, professor of culture! If he’s here, the organizers of this thing have real class!” Bernie rattled the ice cubes in his glass with a Hollywood flair. It was clearly not his first drink, perhaps not even his second. His cheeks were flushed and the boyish challenge in his eyes was like the irresistible grin of an ex–juvenile delinquent. His glance shifted from Andrew to Ann Lee, his eyes widening at her young, scantily clothed body in its shimmering black fabric. “And who is this enchanting lady?” asked the president of New York University. A good head taller than she was, he bent with a dandyish grace, his well-honed seductive instincts set in motion, took her small hand in his big, rough one, and kept it there considerably longer than was necessary. Taken by surprise, Andrew stammered an introduction. “Bernie, I’d like you to meet Ann Lee. Ann Lee is . . .” He looked for a way to end the sentence as banally as most sentences did on an evening like this, but Ann Lee cut him short. “Nice to meet you, I’m his midlife crisis,” she told Bernie.
Bernie’s eyes lit up with genuine interest. He liked women like this. “Is that so?” he said to Andrew. “You sly devil, you! Where have you been hiding her all this time?” He sidled up to Ann Lee and put an impish arm around her. “My heartfelt gratitude for thinking I could steal her from you!”
Ann Lee giggled flirtatiously. She was out to punish him tonight, no doubt. Bernie gave Andrew a cunning wink, his heavy, bearlike paw resting with playful possessiveness on Ann Lee’s thin, sleeveless arm. Andrew was at a loss. What was he supposed to do now? Wink back with a complicit, hedonistic chuckle? With a grimace that might have passed for a smile, he tried, not very successfully, to respond. Not that he was in any danger. Bernie wasn’t about to walk off with her. It was just his way of carrying on.
“Bernie, you old lech! Bet you’ll tell me she’s your granddaughter!”
Bernie turned to face the speaker, letting Andrew and Ann Lee slip from his field of attention. “Come on, Mike! You know me too well for that. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
He released Ann Lee’s arm, his fingertips gliding down it in parting, and turned to his new conversation partner, a balding, paunchy man with a pink silk pocket square that matched his tie. Andrew watched them embrace and slap each other’s backs like two old gangsters in a film. Yes, everything had changed. Someone in the city had changed the rules of the game without telling him.
“Okay, I was nice to your boss.” Ann Lee poked a small, sharp, mirthless elbow in Andrew’s ribs. “I think I’ve earned my champagne fair and square.”
Andrew looked at her, trying to relate the figure in front of him to the woman he knew and loved, but soon gave up. He hurried to get to the bar before it closed, bumping into already seated guests and skirting the main table while averting his eyes from the obscenely long swan’s neck dangling from it. Once he and Linda had seen a pair of swans appear from nowhere, as if born from the ocean’s foam. It was on the beach in Cape Cod. The girls were playing at the water’s edge. Their little footprints, erased from the sand by each wave, were engraved in his memory forever, as if tattooed on the surface of the earth. Two long-necked, white swans were flying westward with infinite care. Their resolve, their self-mastery! A cool, shivery breeze blew from the water. Linda, as usual, was busy snapping her camera. It never ceased to annoy him, this need of hers to record every second. As if she knew that it would pass, that everything would pass, how transitory everything was. Where was the goddamn bar?
16
The meat was served in shameless, orgiastic quantities. Whole plump partridges were impaled on large, sooty iron spits to suggest that they had been roasted in the hearth of a medieval castle. Game birds, almost green from aging and smelling faintly of death. The quails came in nests of golden mashed potatoes, deep-fried to a crisp. Three small, spotted quail’s eggs were nestled under the scrawny body of the dead bird. Waiters hovered silently at the guests’ backs, filling and refilling glasses with a heavy, overbearing Bordeaux that suited neither the humid late spring evening nor the meat, which begged for something lighter, less dominant—perhaps a Burgundy? Even a nice California Pinot Noir would have been better. Andrew regarded the bird on his plate with revulsion. His stomach was turned by the over-explicitness of the visual metaphor as much as by the cruelty of it. The whole evening was wildly overstated. It was the victory of naked, unmediated power over the subtly discriminating mind. Everyone who was anyone in the city had been invited tonight: the mayor, the commissioner of cultural affairs, the curators of the large museums, the influential academics, and, of course, the wealthy art lovers. Raw, arrogant self-interest hung over the gathering like a cloud. What, really, was behind it? Were the city’s masters poised for a real estate grab in which the Douglas-Sallon Building would be sold for a fortune to private investors as soon as it was emptied of the last of its dubious paintings? Was it some other scam? Something was indeed rotten in the kingdom, as rotten as the meat on his plate.
A shriek of laughter came from across the table. Ann Lee, sitting on its other side and half-hidden by a centerpiece of flowers, was completely drunk. She had been drinking heavily all evening, much too much. She had also been ignoring him while giggling in whispers with the man next to her. Himself a good twenty years older than she, he had an aging playboy’s slicked-back hair and an artificial tan that painted him a lurid orange. Andrew turned sideways to survey the dimly lit ballroom. Its dull golds and crepuscular scarlets and indigos could have come from one of the museum’s wretched paintings. All that was missing was a mysterious hand to write a wrathful prophecy of doom on the walls. Where was Bernie? It was irrational, he knew, but Andrew had been relieved to discover he was sitting nowhere near Ann Lee. Now, he spotted his Roman noble’s profile at a VIP table near the speakers’ podium, eating and drinking gustily while conversing with an expensively dressed, foreign-looking man whose laugh echoed through the ballroom. Although Andrew knew him from somewhere, he couldn’t remember from where. Was he Indian? Perhaps Pakistani? Where had he seen him before? At some ceremony at the university, perhaps. His gaze followed the shafts of light rising to the ceiling. Little, carefully spaced spotlights beamed a thin, psychedelic lacework over the main tables, which seemed to hover above the floor. There sat the generals, the real power brokers. The rest of us are just foot soldiers, junior officers at most! They sit there, and he is sitting here, obsessing about the tastes of wines, the textures of foods, and his absurd tit-for-tat games with a woman young enough to be his daughter. And yet power was something he had never craved. Knowledge was not a commodity! He had wanted something else, something more spiritual. One could laugh at his innocence or at the anachronism of his thinking, but he had wanted to be a seeker of truth. No, that, too, was ridiculous. Who knew what he had wanted? What person could seriously and honestly s
tate he didn’t care about power? Who knows what their true motivations are, anyway? Who could even think with all the loud blather and hearty guffaws, with all these smug, crass faces around him?
Another burst of drunken, unnatural laughter came from across the table. Andrew looked despairingly at Ann Lee through the serrated leaves of the tropical flower arrangement, in whose claws she appeared to be caught. She was so fragile and helpless—so young, so thin, so trapped in the bizarre, pointless role she was being made to play. His heart went out to her. If only he could lean across the table and stroke her cheek tenderly. If only he could go over to her, take her gently in his arms, and lead her away from here, take her home. But there wasn’t a chance. It was impossible to leave now. The show must go on. He dug his fork into a quail, detaching a piece of gray, fibrous meat and putting it cautiously in his mouth. It was thick and cartilaginous, revolting. What now? How could he swallow such offal, which had aroused his repugnance from the moment it was served? But to spit it back into his plate? Into a napkin nonchalantly raised to his mouth? How could he do so without being seen?
A polite question coming from Andrew’s left, not a word of which registered, put an end to his agonizing by forcing him to bolt down the meat stuck between his teeth. He turned to his inquisitor, a New York matron whose too tightly drawn skin and too perfectly arched brows testified to an expensive surgical intervention, trying in vain to decode what she had said. With a cautious smile—she had obviously been warned not to risk rupturing a perfect knife job by smiling too energetically—she repeated her question. Andrew felt a wave of nausea. The meat was creeping down his gullet, on its way to his stomach. What did she want? He couldn’t understand a word. Had her face-lift affected her speech? What was that buzzing in his ears? He couldn’t hear a thing. Smile, smile and nod—that always worked! It made them think you were in total agreement. Where was the restroom? He scanned the corners of the room, looking for a hidden recess. His stomach, queasily squeezing the dead bird’s flesh, was determined to send it back. And now someone was talking on his right: he would have to face in that direction. He just mustn’t throw up. He absolutely mustn’t!
Andrew turned to the right, forcing himself to look up. At once, however, he looked down again with a feeling of vertigo: the woman sitting there looked like the identical twin of the woman on his left. They even had the same smile and dull, expressionless voice. Baring his teeth in a contorted smile, he rose half-instinctively, desperately gripping the table. Where was the men’s room? He had to find the men’s room! He straightened up, letting the white napkin on his knee fall to the floor, and groped his way blindly through the dim, sticky ballroom, holding on to columns and the backs of seats while bumping into the waiters, who buzzed angrily around him like bees whose hive had been breached. Ann Lee’s contrived, hollow laugh followed him until he reached the restroom’s heavy, soundproof door and closed it behind him, shutting out the insufferable din.
The toilet stall was cool and quiet, a little island of sanity amid the bedlam. He leaned forward, rested his palms against the wall, bent over the low toilet bowl, and tried to puke. His stomach turned over and he retched, his insides contracting like a boa constrictor, but nothing came out. He straightened up, gulped some air-conditioned air, and leaned back over the bowl. The great snake writhed wildly and finally ejected a gleaming, toxic yellow liquid. Was it whiskey? Bile? A terrible sensation of heartburn made him choke. He was in a gray desert, stretching in all directions like an infinite, menacing ocean. A dreadful stench of death and desolation was everywhere. Wails of terror and sorrow pierced the noxious air like the blasts of a horn. The exhausted little birds flailed helplessly on the ground with gasping beaks, gray wings beating the drab desert dust. The stench, the fetor of rotting corpses! He retched again. The toxic yellow liquid slashed his throat like a knife. The gray little birds flailed helplessly on the ground. The rabble threw itself on them, crazed with hunger. Hardened fingers tore them apart, ripping open their innards, from which spilled mangled guts and little red hearts that went on beating in human hands until they stopped.
Andrew returned haltingly to his seat, his face damp from repeated washing and his moist hair neatly combed in an unconvincing attempt to look refreshed. He had to find some way of making conversation with the women next to him. It was rude not to have spoken a single word to them all evening. He wasn’t delivering the goods! What on earth was he doing here, anyway? The malignant doubt had gnawed at him all evening: he was defrauding the event’s organizers, selling them an illusion of influence and importance he didn’t have. Of course, that was ridiculous. His influence was considerable and would become more so when his new appointment took effect. Speaking of which, it was odd that Bernie hadn’t so much as alluded to it recently, neither in their private conversations nor in the presence of others. Why the mantle of secrecy? All these Byzantine court intrigues were so out of place, so uncalled for. And this table, his empty seat sticking out like a missing tooth, the two women on either side of it sitting as straight and stiff as if embalmed by the doctors to keep their bodies from decaying still further, carefully chewing their gray meat with smiles that looked like they were pasted to their faces with superglue!
Enough negativity! To work! Andrew sat down, reached for his napkin that had been picked up, refolded, and put back in place by an alert waiter, and peered through the flower arrangement for a glimpse of Ann Lee. The table had grown suddenly quiet. Her hysterical giggles that had pursued him to the ends of the ballroom had yielded to a worrisome, ominous silence. Cocking his head to get a better view, he felt a chill run down his spine. Ann Lee’s seat was empty, as was the man’s next to her. Her scarf was gone, too, along with her handbag. She had left. Without telling him, without saying good-bye, without a word! Gone, she and her awful fake-tanned companion. She would never come back. Never! He caught his breath. His lungs gasped for air. His skin crawled as if a colony of ants underneath it were repelling an attacker. She was gone! He would never see her again!
An impatient voice blared near his left ear. It reverberated like the sound of a trumpet on some other floor of the building. His clothes felt tight, the wrong size, as if he had suddenly put on more weight. The strange voice blared again, more insistently. Andrew turned toward it. With barely disguised annoyance, a broad-shouldered waiter with a black satin bow tie around a thick neck was standing next to him, almost touching him, while extending a hand toward his plate. Andrew arched startled brows, shocked by the physical intrusion on his space. The gray, exhausted birds fell from the air in midflight, hitting the ground with a dull thud like ripe fruit from an old, heavily laden tree. The waiter repeated his question, his animosity more pronounced. The words reached Andrew’s ears like thick bubbles from the bottom of the sea. “Sir, are you done? May I please take away your plate?” What an exaggerated, aggressive show of politeness! Andrew turned to look at his plate. The little gray corpse lay practically untouched, its orphaned eggs peering from beneath its stiffened body that still seemed to be retracting in fright, as though in the middle of rigor mortis. Andrew nodded, equally embarrassed and intimidated, watching his plate unceremoniously snatched by a hand powerful enough to be a boxer’s. “Thank you, sir.” The words rumbled like a crack of thunder overhead. She was gone. She would never come back. He peered through the flower arrangement again, hoping desperately to see her sitting there with her captivating smile. It was just a practical joke, wasn’t it? A small, harmless joke! Soon she would return and they could go home together. She wasn’t there. Her abandoned seat was still empty. Yet the aging playboy was back in place, holding his wineglass while chatting idly with the woman on his other side, ignored until now for his exclusive tête-à-tête with Ann Lee that had driven Andrew—no, everyone—to distraction. The scandalous incivility of it! A warm, almost triumphant feeling spread through him. What a relief! Joy! As chagrined as he was to admit it, he felt like a new man. No, it wasn’t Ann Lee’s disappearance that had tormented hi
m. It was his jealousy, foolish, childish, and irrational.
But the relief did not last long, cut short by a shudder that ran through him. What if she had gone off with Bernie? That old fox, that serial skirt-chaser! Though painfully conscious of the absurdity of his fear, he couldn’t defend himself against its predatory bite that sank its teeth into him. He fought to fend it off, struggling to restore the rule of common sense, yet he found himself casting an anxious, involuntary glance at the main table, praying to find Bernie there without her. Suppose she was there, sitting in his lap, the thin strap of her black dress, slipped from her shoulder, revealing a small, impudent breast in the lewd glare of the spotlights? Enough! Enough of this! He had to stop. Bernie was there by himself, oblivious to the neurotic drama taking place a few tables away, drinking, laughing, and talking loudly with the elegant Indian man sitting to his left. A strong, healthy, powerful man! Still, Andrew continued to indulge his tormented imagination a while longer: Bernie’s strong, age-spotted hand lifting the hem of her short dress, stroking her smooth thigh with a proprietary air, slowly, pleasurably, making its way upward . . . There was nothing to stop him from torturing himself. How filthy, how putrid, it all was! Nausea welled up in him again, threatening to erupt like a volcano and engulf the room and its degenerate diners, the whole drunken bordello of them. What had they put in the food, for God’s sake? How could a tiny piece of meat poison a grown man like that?